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Society Assaulted: Audit Culture, and Austerity in Europe and Asia organized by Jawaharlal Nehru University which is dated on March 19 2015. The speaker will argue that the globally dominant economic systems broadly subsumed under the generic label of "neoliberalism" have exploited forms of audit culture, themselves an evolved derivative of colonial management, to destroy the infrastructure of ordinary social relations. While this process continues the logic of nationalist doctrines that sought to expropriate kinship as a state metaphor, its menace is today amplified by the sheer scale of its operations. Resistance is usually unsuccessful; the few exceptions risk marginalizing those who do succeed as hold-outs from an earlier era, unfit for the modern world. An engaged anthropology must actively oppose this massive trend, but must do so through the difficult task of interesting a jaded public in the significance of ethnographic detail. Focusing on patterns observable in large areas of Europe and Asia, and more particularly on contrasted cases of resistance to eviction on which he has conducted ethnographic research in Rome and Bangkok, the speaker will suggest why some cases of resistance succeed while others fail, and why some do catch the public eye; he will then also describe the practical problems involved in sustaining public interest and taking it beyond a merely romantic obsession with heroic resistance and tragic destruction.